Alcoa workers protest against their dismissals from employment in Rome, September 2012. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

In his New Year's Eve speech, Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, acknowledged the unemployment crisis, reading out letters from people who are living through it. Yet apparently other members of the Italian government think differently. The minister of economics Fabrizio Saccomanni tweeted about the employment outlook improving. Even the prime minister, Enrico Letta, said that economic recovery seems to be just around the corner.

This news about a recovery simply isn't true. The latest report from the Italian Institute for Statistics (Istat) confirmed that unemployment has reached emergency levels, and 15.8% of Italians living in poverty. The overall jobless rate is 12.5%, the highest since 1977. But the new record contained in this report is the youth jobless rate, which rose to 41.2%, from 40.5% the previous month. Italy's unemployment is an emergency for all of the EU.

I have closely followed Italy's recent crisis and job losses from the beginning. On 24 February 2010, a group of redundant workers occupied the abandoned prison on the Asinara island, north of Sardinia and a few miles away from Silvio Berlusconi's estate, famous for its sexy parties. They demonstrated against their factory shutting down – the one in which my father had been working for the past 35 years.

I thought the workers' idea was brilliant: instead of going to Rome and screaming at the parliament, they decided to go to the most isolated place in Italy, harming no one, and putting themselves behind bars. How come only one, local, newspaper was reporting it? I decided to help those workers get coverage with my friend Marco Nurra, a trainee at the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

A few days earlier, a popular TV show, Celebrity Island, the Italian version of I'm A Celebrity, had started. We opened a Facebook group called Redundancy Island (L'isola dei cassintegrati) with a plan to parody the TV format and get the Asinara workers publicity, as if they were celebrities. We started documenting what was happening on the island and describing the different characters there. A week later, when we started a blog of the same name, we already had 35,000 members on Facebook, which soon after reached 100k. With the help of our followers, the workers got on television and suddenly became famous.

The workers stayed on the island for one year and we reported each day about them. Yet after the Asinara demonstration was over, our story continued. The Redundancy Island blog is now an most important source of journalism about workers in Italy. In November 2012 we became a partner of the weekly L'Espresso, and we won a prize at the International Journalism Festival of Perugia. It was no longer our blog, or that of the Asinara workers – it belonged to our community. Leaders of demonstrations, the working poor, women fired for being pregnant: these interactions have become the crowdsourced database for our journalistic work.

Much more than a blog, Redundancy Island is a parody of the Italian media – and of political communication too. Why did a bunch of workers decide to put themselves behind bars? Because they had no one to talk to. Not the unions, not the newspapers, not the politicians. Why did such a small blog became so popular? Because our stories fill a gap: between the crisis that millions of Italians experience every day and its absence from mainstream political discussion.

Despite everything, the Asinara workers factory closed anyway. We worked very hard to tell their story. Unfortunately, the establishment didn't listen. For the most part, it still isn't.